“For your information, I would not wreck this vessel even if we were in the harbor. I’ve taken my turn at the wheel many times over the years.” He paused. “You intend to paint me?”
She avoided looking at him. “You promised you’d pose when you had time. Now you have the time.”
He lifted a brow. “I was planning on being quite busy on this journey.”
“But then you’d have to break your promise and I don’t think you’d do that.” She started for the door. “I believe you’re a man who keeps his promises even when it proves inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient? Iache, my dear.”
She flushed. “Well, it’s your own fault. I made no objections to our original agreement. If it was enough for you to fornicate with me instead of trying to humble me, you would be much more comfortable now.” She opened the door. “I’ll see you on the bridge.”
After the door closed behind her, he stood looking at the cobweb lace of the robe on the bed. Once more she was trying to snatch victory from defeat and her valor touched him even as it frustrated him.
He turned and slowly followed Juliette from the cabin.
She could do nothing with Jean Marc, Juliette thought with frustration. She had captured the wild carelessness of the wind lifting Jean Marc’s dark hair and molding his white shirt to his lean body, the grace of his beautiful fingers grasping the polished oak of the wheel, but his face…His face was shuttered and without expression, that same glittering mirror mocking her. She had to havemore.
“You really do know how to guide this monstrous ship.” Juliette sketched the night-black sweep of hair from Jean Marc’s temple. “I thought you were only a banker.”
“There’s no ‘only’ about being a banker. It requires a good deal more skill in avoiding dangerous shoals than captaining a ship. In truth, I grew up on ships. My father had no feeling for the sea, but I did. From the time I was seven I was allowed to go on short journeys along the coast from Marseilles to Nice to Toulon.” Jean Marc looked past her shoulder out to sea. “It was never enough. I tried to persuade my father to let me go on a long voyage, but he refused.”
“Why?”
“The usual reason. A father wishes to protect his son. He loved me.”
“Did you love him?”
His face softened miraculously. “Oh, yes. I loved him.”
Her pen froze in mid-stroke. She had never seen him look so vulnerable. Her pen raced across the page, trying desperately to catch the expression before it fled. “I’d think he would let you have what you wanted if he loved you.”
“He was a gentle man and he knew the life at sea was a rough one. He didn’t understand why I wanted to do anything so barbaric as sail. When I was fourteen I took passage as a cabin boy on theAlbatross.”
“I thought you said he wouldn’t let you do it.”
“He didn’t. My father’s mistress, Charlotte d’Abois, arranged it with Paul Basteau, the captain of theAlbatross. I just got on the ship one day and sailed out of the harbor.”
“But if your father refused you, would he not be angry with her?”
He didn’t answer, and for a moment she thought she’d lost him. “Charlotte ruled him. She had a strong will and she used it.” He looked hard at her. “As you do, Juliette.”
The vulnerable expression was gone, but he was still open to her. Her pen moved quickly across the sheet. “Yet she gave you what you wanted when your father refused you.”
“She gave me eighteen months on a slave ship.” His face hardened. “I was beginning to fight her and she wanted me out of the way. Basteau was the only captain she could persuade to take me.”
“A slave ship? Your company deals in slaves?”
“All shippers dealt in slaves. The slave trade was profitable and I thought nothing of it. I’d heard of the slave ships all my life, and even my father took it for granted.” His eyes glittered coldly. “However, I thought about it a good deal in those months on theAlbatross. We boarded five hundred sixty-two slaves in Africa and we landed three hundred and three in Jamaica. Theslavers chained them side by side, some on top of each other.” He looked blindly at the horizon. “I tried to tell Basteau to let them go, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He knew his duty. I was only a boy, and Charlotte had made it quite clear to him that slaves meant gold. The loss of two hundred and fifty-nine lives was acceptable on such a long journey.”
Juliette stared at him in horror as his gaze shifted to her face.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked bitterly. “I didn’tknow. I tried to help them. I tried to get better food to them. I nursed some of the sick. I even tried to help them keep clean. The stench…It did no good. They kept dying.…” He drew a deep breath. “I left the ship in Jamaica. It took me seven months to get passage back to Marseilles.”
She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t speak again and she looked down with stinging eyes at her sketch of him. The picture she had drawn was of a man she didn’t know. There was nothing hidden or cynical about this face; it held only pain, disillusionment, and an unutterable weariness. The Jean Marc she knew was a hard man, but that boy had not been hard. He had sought freedom and adventure and found only horror. “What did you do when you returned to Marseilles?”
His abstraction vanished as his gaze focused on her face and then dropped to the sketch. “You always told me you’d learn me. Is that what you’ve been doing by this probing?”
Her hand was trembling and she had to steady it as she deepened the planes of the face on the sketch. “I was curious and thought only to ask.” Then she looked up at him and shook her head impatiently. “No, I wasn’t being honest. Sometimes it helps me to get a true picture if I encourage the subject to talk. But you didn’t have to answer me. Why did you?”
